James Franco: ‘Grateful’ for His Fall From Grace
Oscar nominee James Franco is in Rome Film Festival for the launch of Italian director Claudio Giovannesi’s Hey Joe.
In the gritty drama, Franco plays Dean, an alcoholic American WWII vet who winds up back in Naples in the early 1970s in search of a son he fathered there before absconding to New Jersey.
The film is his first to surface on the fest circuit since his career went on hiatus after a now-settled 2019 lawsuit alleging that he sexually exploited young women who took his acting class.
In 2021, Franco admitted to sleeping with students at his acting school, saying “that was wrong” but “it wasn’t a master plan on my part.”
He was cast out of Hollywood, with his first movie to hit the screen since 2019 is the French thriller “The Price of Money: A Largo Winch Adventure,” which came out in France in July but has no U.S. release.
Franco is thankful for his fall from grace “Being told you’re bad is painful. But ultimately, that’s kind of what I needed to just stop going the way I was going.”
Recently, he’s been drawing inspiration from the self-help book “The Second Mountain,” by New York Times columnist David Brooks, which preaches that one can’t find midlife satisfaction until committing to a cause larger than oneself. “From everything I’ve read, it seems like that’s the more fulfilling life,” he says calmly. He’s also been drawing and painting a lot, and recently launched a Hollywood streetwear fashion label that he co-founded with longtime friend Kyle Lindgren. But what about his movie career?
